The Inside Story of How Ivanka Trump Met Her Women's Empowerment Guru Dina Powell

The relationship between Dina Powell and Ivanka Trump began inauspiciously: with a cold call.

Speaking at a Thursday evening dinner in Washington, D.C., Powell, who is now deputy national security adviser for strategy and senior counselor for economic initiatives, told the story of receiving an unexpected phone call soon after the 2016 presidential election.

Powell, then head of Goldman Sachs’s Impact Investing team and president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation, was in her office one day when she was told: “Ivanka Trump’s on the phone.”

“She was doing a tremendous amount of research,” Powell told the audience at the dinner honoring the 2017 class of the Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership. “She is a numbers person. She had seen 10,000 Women [one of Goldman’s major initiatives focused on helping female entrepreneurs around the world] and some of the other programs and she said, you know, ‘I want to understand how that program works. How do you measure success?’ She was really thinking about, you know, how she could lend her voice.”

Powell credits her career success to “not overplanning,” she told the D.C. audience. “It’s just taking that leap of faith.” For her, that meant taking a job at an investment bank with no experience in finance—and then leaving that job to work for a brand-new administration.

SPONSORED FINANCIAL CONTENT

You May Like

Read More

Sign Up for Our Newsletters

Sign up now to receive FORTUNE's best content, special offers, and much more.